I can’t compete with that, so I thought I’d start a list of Media Oops-es, i.e., cockups. This is all in the interest of media transparency, you understand. Shooting from the hip is just as big a problem for blogging journalists as it is for rednecks and Harriet Harman – though I suspect her invective was planned.

(Update: since this is about educating student journalists, I thought I would cross-post to the Online Journalism Blog in addition to the Wardman Wire).

The first one comes via Justin McKeating, who’s doing something slightly similar, though I suspect we’ll be tracking different bits of media silliness.

Rentoul came up with a slightly unflattering comparison:

A friend draws my attention to a resemblance I had not noticed.

Ed Miliband, he says, reminds him of Watto, the hovering, scuzzy garage owner on Tatooine who enslaves little boys in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, my favourite film of the six.

Miliband spoke in his speech to Labour conference of his being compared to “Wallace out of Wallace and Gromit” – although he department from the text issued, “I can see the resemblance”, to say: “I gather some people can see the resemblance.”

But I thought he looked more like Gromit – the dog who is cleverer than his master who expresses himself mainly by his eyebrows.

If he’d just left it there none of us would have made a fuss. But he thought better of it and deleted the piece. As Justin says:

1 thought on “John Rentoul, Media Oops Number 1 : You cannot close the door once a blog post has bolted”

Pour Ed Miliband. Add to this his slight lisp and what I have remotely diagnosed as polyps – adding a very nasal quality to his speech – he probably does not stand much of a chance. Which is a shame for Labour.
Surely by now everybody in the media/blogoshpere knows that you cannot get away with deleting tweets, blogs etc. – so why do they bother?
I quite enjoy media fuck-ups by so-called media experts, a nice reminder that no-one is immune from temporary and sudden loss of rational thought…